


as my world unknits

by gogollescent



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-06
Updated: 2012-10-06
Packaged: 2017-11-15 17:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aral, Cordelia, and a little newlywed nookie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as my world unknits

Their marriage was a private ceremony, hardly attended: most of the men he might have cared to invite being dead, or hospitalized, and most of Cordelia's family apparently believing that she was dead, or hospitalized. She was radiant, in fact. Doubly so if you allowed for the brainwashing. He did not think that Captain Negri, with all his enthusiasm for the Betan therapist's delusions, could reproduce the look she gave him, unsmiling and wicked, her mouth almost pursed with the effort of its stillness.

"You know," she said, taking his hand, "we were never engaged. We got married without being engaged."

"I disagree," said Aral Vorkosigan, and bent to press her hand to his cheek.

*

Afterward they retreated to the pavilion, chased from the cool house by a certain number of discreetly knowing looks. "It's not as if we weren't having intercourse before this," said Cordelia, indignant, while Aral tried to calculate the likely range of his father's hearing in his old age and concluded, grimly, that on such an occasion it might well extend for miles.

Her muttering caught up with him. "--wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so damn coy, but no, no one wants to come up and wish us happy coitus directly, though you can't claim they don't want--"

"Cordelia," he said.

"--little meat-incubated Vorkosigans toddling around come spring-- yes, Aral?"

He considered a number of possible responses. "Take pity on the general staff, and remember that if you say coitus in their presence their ears will be bleeding for days," sprang to mind. Or, "Surely intercourse is too dignified a word." But then that was untrue: though she'd snuck into his room like a teenager-- like Ges, in fact, though without the accompanying reek-- they had in the moment been serious, both aware that pleasure so long delayed could easily have curdled in the dark; like wine set aside for some more deserving occasion and found, years later, to have turned vinegar. But they were lucky, or else inevitable, and in the curve of her long neck and back he had discovered her as he had always discovered her, astonishing and complete even to the ends of herself.

"I like your dress," he said instead. He smiled at her with what he suspected was a look of irritatingly vacuous pleasure. Cordelia stared at him, and smiled too, with a look of something quite different.

"I'm glad," she said. "It recommended itself to me in several key aspects. For example-- it's quite easy to remove."

Then she kissed him, effectively putting paid to any nascent fashion consciousness. Unbidden his hands rose to frame her shoulders, and she pressed closer, stepping almost between his wide-set feet to catch his mouth on hers. With one hand she found his nape and twined her fingers in the short-cropped hair, guiding his head down past her lips until he was mouthing her hard jaw. "Oh, good," she said, when his tongue touched her pulse; then backed him up to the seat behind him, until, knees brought forcibly to bear with ancient wood, he sat, and descending she straddled him.

"That was very tactical," he said, amused. From her superior vantage point Cordelia glinted at him. "Thank you," she said, with cheery ruthlessness. Her hair was falling loose from its high knot and hung in russet twists down either side of her face. "I've had plans for this pavilion since I got here."

"I didn't know you were interested in interior decorating," he said, and was punished by a hand up his shirt. "A very proper hobby for a Vor lady," he added, breath hitching a little as her palm skimmed his flank: hitching worse when her thumb circled his flat nipple.

Fortunately there was not much call for speech after that.

*

"It is, though," he said later.

They were both more or less clothed again, if with more overlap than hitherto. She had definitely appropriated his socks, for one thing. He wasn't sure why. The sun was starting to lower over the water, its light having that peculiar transparency and sharpness that comes in the last moments before flesh tones touch the sky, but it was nothing like cold. But: Betan, he remembered, born-- decanted-- on a planet where water was more precious than anything except perhaps self-possession, and warmth was an infinitely renewable resource. Strange, to realize anew that everything that to him looked like bare reality, or even like lack, was to her inconceivable wealth.

Sex was like sleep in that surfacing from its pull required brief amnesia. He had forgotten her mind was not his.

As if to prove the point, Cordelia said, "Huh?"

"Interior design," said Aral patiently. "It's a respectable way to pass the time."

The eyeroll this won him was most impressive, especially since she seemed barely able to open said eyes at all. Not that he was smug. It was an observation. If the observation was filed away in its own mental cabinet, with plenty of triumphant footnotes attached, well, that was its business. "I think I preferred it when pillow talk was wondering if Bothari was still stalking the hallway outside," said Cordelia, quellingly, and he tucked her hair behind her ear, neither able nor eager to restrain his tenderness, which seemed to burst in pulses of soft heat from the innermost center of his soul.

"I didn't just mean for you," he said.

This made her lift her head from his lap and look at him. "It's very disturbing when you go domestic."

"I know," he admitted, putting his arm over her. "I get the most unnerving sense that my mother is speaking through me from beyond the grave."

Cordelia was quiet for a moment. "Was she much for decorating?"

"Oh, yes. Landscaping too. Of course, she generally abandoned her projects halfway in, distracted by something newer and more ambitious, so the total result could be a little… eccentric. We still have a fountain somewhere that falls over if you poke it."

Cordelia smiled, and her eyes closed again. The play of light was turning orange on her cheek. "She sounds a terror."

"My brother and I certainly lived in fear of the day she decided to redo the wallpaper on our play room," said Aral, but he was finding it difficult, now, to contain whatever old and burgeoning emotions had collected in the wordless bottom of his mind, and he fell silent, thinking of this house, and the house in the capital. Residences much bigger than he was, but not bigger than the two of them, and two was such a temporary number. Could he not occupy himself with occupation? Redress wrongs done to wainscoting, rather than to populations? He knew that she doubted his ability to go long without returning to politics and blood; but there and then, with her head heavy on his thigh, he thought that he might make it after all. He might have only her, and the land, and the fading gold on her hair, and by all that have still more grace than honor-- more peace than grace.


End file.
